Truman

by David McCullough

  Nominations for the vice presidency were scheduled for the next day, but as the evening wore on, with more speeches and fanfare for Roosevelt, the surge for Wallace kept growing. The heat inside the hall was nearly unbearable.

  At the Blackstone, Hannegan told Truman he might have to be nominated that night, depending whether they had the votes. They would have to be ready to move fast. Bennett Clark was supposed to nominate Truman, but no one knew where he was. Clark, whose wife had died the year before, had been drinking more than usual. Truman went to look for him. Hannegan started for the convention hall.

  When the speeches and roll call ended, and the President was swiftly renominated, the delegates settled down to hear his speech. The familiar voice came booming from a cluster of amplifiers, as the huge crowd sat watching the empty podium. Absolute silence hung over the darkened hall, even during the President’s pauses. With no one on stage, the effect was eerie. Roosevelt was speaking from his railroad car in San Diego.

  “What is the job before us in 1944?” the great, disembodied voice asked. “First, to win the war—to win the war fast, to win it overpoweringly. Second, to form worldwide international organizations, and to arrange to use the armed forces of the sovereign nations of the world to make another war impossible…. "

  No sooner was the speech over than a Wallace demonstration erupted. From every corner of the stadium came a chant of “We want Wallace!” The organist, catching the spirit, began pumping away at the Wallace theme song, “Iowa, Iowa, That’s Where the Tall Corn Grows,” over and over. Ed Pauley, livid with rage, threatened to chop the wires to the amplifiers unless the tune was changed.

  Bob Hannegan was seen hurriedly conferring with Mayor Kelly in the Illinois delegation. Then they were both up on the podium, heads together with Chairman Jackson. To several of the Wallace floor leaders it looked suddenly as if the time to nominate their man was then, that night, and the quicker the better.

  “I sat there and watched the demonstration and I saw it growing in volume,” remembered Claude Pepper, who, as head of the Florida delegation, was positioned on the aisle. “I stood up on my seat, and I could see the whole convention hall then. And I said [to myself], ‘You know, that’s a real demonstration….’ So after it got into full speed and steam, I said, ‘If we could bring this nomination up right now, we could nominate Henry Wallace.’ ”

  At the rear of the hall now, Hannegan had started throwing open the outer doors to let more people in, while, at the same time, Ed Kelly kept shouting about fire rules.

  Desperate to get the chairman’s eye, Pepper tried hopping up and down on his chair, waving the Florida banner, but to no avail. His floor microphone had been turned off.

  He jumped down and started up the aisle, fighting his way through the crowd. Reporters, hundreds of delegates, and spectators saw him and knew at once what he was trying to do. If he could get to the podium, he would make the nominating speech himself with no more delay.

  And then when I got to the little gate [remembered Pepper], the little fence around the podium where the Chairman presided…well, fortunately, there was a railroad labor man that was minding the gate. He was a friend of mine, so he opened the gate and let me in…I got up to about the second step from the top going just as hard as I could to get up that stairway, and I saw the Chairman look over there. He had seen me coming up the aisle. And so, immediately—by this time I got about nearly to the first step—the Chairman said, “Motion made. The convention adjourned. All in favor of the motion, let me know by saying ‘Aye, aye.’ ” And, “That’s it.” And, “The convention’s adjourned.” And I by that time was just about to the top step. And they started roaring, “No, no, no, no.”

  Jackson later told Pepper he had hated to do what he did, but that he had promised the newspaper and radio people to hold the vice-presidential decision until the next day when they would be better prepared. Jackson admitted he had seen Pepper trying to get his attention, that he had an eye on him the whole time he was heading for the podium, and knew perfectly well why he was coming. What he did not tell Pepper was that he and Bob Hannegan had already made an agreement to shut things down that night before the Wallace people could start the nominations. The public explanation was that the decision was a matter of necessity, because of fire laws.

  Harry Truman had witnessed none of this. He had spent the night in search of Bennett Clark, finding him finally in a room where he was not supposed to be, at the Sherman, and too drunk to say much more than hello. By then it was past midnight. “So I called Bob [Hannegan],” Truman remembered, “and said, ‘I found your boy. He’s cockeyed. I don’t know whether I can get him ready or not, and I hope to Christ I can’t.’ ”

  Of all those in Missouri who had kept track of Harry Truman’s activities and accomplishments in the Senate over the past nine years, none had been so attentive, appraising his every move, as his mother Martha Ellen Truman, who remained a close reader of the Congressional Record and a more partisan Democrat than almost anyone he knew. Once, introducing her to a political friend, Truman told her the man had grown up in Mississippi and had never seen a Republican until he was twelve. “He didn’t miss much,” she replied.

  For days now, in her small parlor at Grandview, she had been sitting close to the radio, following the convention. Interviewed by reporters, she said she did not want her son to become Vice President. He should stay in the Senate, she said emphatically.

  “I listened to all the Republican Convention, too. They keep predicting that Roosevelt will die in office if he’s elected. The Republicans hope he will. They keep saying that I’ll die, too, and I’m almost 92.1 hope Roosevelt fools ’em.”

  The final session inside the stadium, Friday, July 21, lasted nine hours and would be described as the strangest, most bitter conclusion to a national convention in a very long time.

  Senator Bennett Clark, after a great deal of black coffee, a shower, and some food, had, with Hannegan’s help, pulled himself together sufficiently to appear on the podium. But his speech for Truman was short and had none of his usual flair. He moved the audience not at all. (In another few weeks, as Truman had anticipated, Bennett Clark went down to defeat in the Democratic primary in Missouri, thereby ending a career in the Senate that many, including Truman, had once thought could lead to the White House.)

  Nor were the seconding speakers much of an improvement. A labor leader from Pennsylvania said that while he did not know the senator personally, he thought Truman would make the strongest possible running mate for the reason that he was a Democrat and an American.

  By contrast, a vigorous speech for Henry Wallace, delivered by an Iowa judge named Richard Mitchell, touched off another noisy demonstration, and Claude Pepper, given a turn at the podium at last, made a moving plea to the Democratic Party not to repudiate the man who more than any other symbolized the democracy of Franklin Roosevelt. Wallace’s delegate strength for the first ballot appeared to be gaining.

  But Hannegan, Flynn, Kelly, and the others had been working through the night, talking to delegates and applying “a good deal of pressure” to help them see the sense in selecting Harry Truman. No one knows how many deals were cut, how many ambassadorships or postmaster jobs were promised, but reportedly, by the time morning came, Postmaster General Frank Walker had telephoned every chairman of every delegation.

  The strategy of the Truman forces was to organize as many favorite-son nominations as possible and thereby keep Wallace from winning on the first ballot. The result was a total of sixteen nominations for Vice President, and as the speeches continued through the long afternoon, delegates in groups of twos and threes were seen going to and from a private air-conditioned room beneath the platform, Room H, at the end of a narrow, dark hall, where, for hours, Senator Truman stood shaking hands. Only later did he emerge to join Bess and Margaret in a box just behind the podium. Henry Wallace was waiting out the session in his hotel room, in keeping with custom, but Truman sat in full view munching o
n a hot dog and enjoying the spectacle.

  The nominating session had drawn some interesting visitors, including film stars Gloria Swanson, who occupied a box close by, and Spencer Tracy, who was besieged by autograph hunters. Among the delegates were seventeen of Truman’s fellow Democrats from the Senate. Ed Flynn and Frank Hague could be seen conferring on the platform, a tableau that caused some veteran observers among the press to recall earlier times when the “big boys” were more discreet about their conniving. But the crowds in the galleries were nothing like the night before. Mayor Kelly’s police had been checking tickets, with the result that thousands of Wallace supporters had been kept out.

  The first ballot began at 4:30 P.M. and Wallace stayed in the lead the whole way, rolling up 429 votes to Truman’s 319, with the remainder divided among Alben Barkley and the favorite sons. By the time the tally became official, it was past six. The convention had been in session for nearly seven hours without pause and the crowd expected to recess for dinner, before the night session. But then Chairman Jackson stepped to the microphones to announce that a second ballot would be taken at once. The convention was still in its afternoon session, which meant no tickets for the night meeting would be honored—and therefore no more Wallace crowds admitted. It was a daring stroke by Hannegan.

  On the second ballot the excitement began to build almost at once. Wallace was ahead until suddenly, just as had been forecast for the second ballot, Ed Flynn delivered to Truman 74 votes from the New York delegation, which had been divided the first time around. Now Truman moved out in front.

  For a moment, the count narrowed again, Wallace pulling to within 5 votes of Truman. Then the break came. Alabama’s favorite son, Senator John Bankhead, withdrew his name and cast 22 Alabama votes for Truman, which gave Truman nearly 500. Delegates rose from their chairs. South Carolina switched 18 votes from Bankhead to Truman and the stampede was on. Indiana, Wyoming, and Maine went over to Truman, while from the galleries came an insistent roar of “We want Wallace!” Photographers were clustering about the Truman box. The senator was smiling broadly. Even Bess, who had looked intermittently grumpy and skeptical through the first ballot, was seen beaming now and turning, as requested, to pose with her husband. Margaret was jumping up and down, cheering as if at a college football game. Over in the Illinois delegation Mayor Kelly shouted to Senator Lucas, “Christ Almighty, let’s get in this thing.” The whole crowd was on its feet.

  Truman only needed one big state. Ohio announced for Truman, which would have been enough but a delegate challenged the count and Ohio passed. Then Senator David I. Walsh of Massachusetts declared that Massachusetts changed its vote to 34 for Truman, and that did it.Senator Harry S. Truman of Missouri, “unofficially but conclusively,” was the party’s nominee for Vice President.

  Illinois, a little late, piled on another 55 votes for Truman and more states followed. Bennett Clark started a Truman procession down the aisles, as a phalanx of police escorted the nominee to the platform. The official tally was running late, but at 8:14, Chairman Jackson formally announced the Truman victory. The final count was Truman 1,031, Wallace 105. William O. Douglas had 4 votes.

  The acceptance speech, one of the shortest in American political history, lasted less than a minute. The nomination was an honor for Missouri, Truman said, and an honor that he accepted “with all humility.” More than the speech, it was the shy, almost embarrassed way he stepped up to the bank of microphones, and the way he stood waiting for the crowd to settle down, that many people would remember. He looked out at the huge hall in tumult, his glasses glinting in the spotlight. Then he stepped back slightly.

  “Now, give me a chance,” he said.

  He was called “the Missouri Compromise” and “the Common Denominator” of the convention. To many it had all been a sad spectacle. “I don’t object to Truman,” wrote Harold Ickes to Bernard Baruch, “but I react strongly against the method of his nomination and the seeming dominating position that the corrupt city bosses now have in the Democratic National organization.” The senator’s Pendergast roots figured in editorials across the country. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette called him one of the weakest candidates ever nominated. Time magazine, which only the summer before had lauded his work on the Truman Committee, portrayed him now as a drab mediocrity, “the mousy little man from Missouri.”

  “Poor Harry Truman. And poor people of the United States,” wrote Richard Strout in The New Republic:

  Truman and the people are the ones who will suffer from that convention deal between Roosevelt and the bosses. Truman is a nice man, an honest man, a good Senator, a man of great humility and a man of courage. He will make a passable Vice President. But Truman as President of the United States in times like these?

  Yet, on balance, the reaction was favorable, if not enthusiastic. For all his machine background, said the Kansas City Star, Harry Truman had “unusual capacity for development.”The New York Times praised his personal qualities and said he had the advantage of having been through the political mill.

  He has known the dust and heat of a political campaign, and has learned the art, not to be despised, of seeking that middle course which will appeal to a majority of the voters. He fought with distinction in the First World War; he has been a farmer; he has known firsthand the difficulties of a small businessman. He has had the kind of experience, in short, likely to make a realist sympathetic to the problems of the varied groups rather than to produce the doctrinaire or the zealot.

  Astonishingly, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch called him an excellent choice. Even Richard Strout in his otherwise gloomy New Republic essay took heart from the idea that Truman, while not brilliant, had character.

  Reflecting on the nomination in the privacy of his diary, reporter Allen Drury wrote:

  On the credit side, the Senator is a fine man: no one would do a better job of it in the White House if he had to. On the other side the Pendergast background made him entirely too vulnerable to Republican attack, and no one who knows him likes to see him subjected to that kind of smearing…. I think Senator Truman is one of the finest men I know.

  Again at Chicago, as so consistently through the Truman career, it had been the system of politics, the boss system, that counted in deciding his fate. There had been no popular boom for him for Vice President. Nor had personal ambition figured. As Richard Rovere wrote, no one ever contrived less at his own elevation than Harry Truman at Chicago. And as time would tell, everything considered, the system, bosses and all, had produced an excellent choice.

  In Independence a few days later, three thousand people streamed across the back lawn at 219 North Delaware to shake hands with the senator, who, in a white seersucker suit, stood beneath a blooming rose arbor beside his wife and daughter. Bess was performing the expected public role, though far from happily. At Chicago after the nomination, as they fought their way out through the crowds to a waiting limousine, with police pushing and shoving, she had turned and glared at her husband, demanding, “Are we going to have to go through this for the rest of our lives?” On the drive home through the smothering July heat of southern Illinois, the atmosphere inside their own car was, as Margaret recalled, “close to arctic.” “Dad tried to be cheerful and philosophical simultaneously. Mother said little.”

  No sooner had they arrived in Independence than Margaret’s Aunt Natalie Wallace, Uncle Frank’s wife, took it upon herself to tell Margaret that her Grandfather Wallace had shot himself. Margaret ought to know, she said, since the story was bound to come out any time now. Shattered, disbelieving, Margaret rushed to the kitchen to ask Vietta Garr if this were true. Vietta nodded. Unable to face her mother, Margaret waited until evening to tell her father what she had heard, and for the first and only time in her life he turned his fury on her.

  “He seized my arm in a grip that he must have learned when he was wrestling calves and hogs around the farmyard,” she remembered. “ ‘Don’t you ever mention that to your mother,’ he said.” Then T
ruman “rocketed” out the door to find Aunt Natalie.

  I wish I could tell you that years later I asked Mother if her anxiety about her father’s death was the hidden reason for her opposition to Dad’s nomination [Margaret would write years later]. But to the end of her life, I never felt free to violate the absolute prohibition Dad issued on that summer night in 1944.

  Out-of-town reporters, looking over the old gray Victorian house for the first time, saw that it needed paint.

  The defeated Henry Wallace immediately declared his all-out support for the ticket, exhibiting no bitterness, and in turn he was praised for his courage and forthrightness. Contrary to predictions, he had had real delegate strength after all and had nearly carried the convention despite all the forces aligned against him. Roosevelt would have had no trouble whatever getting him nominated, had he so decided. But then no one seemed nearer to understanding Roosevelt after the convention than before.

  Eleanor Roosevelt wrote sympathetically to Wallace, “I had hoped by some miracle you could win out, but it looks to me as though the bosses had functioned pretty smoothly. I am told that Senator Truman is a good man, and I hope so for the sake of the country.”

  What was not perceived as yet, because so little was known of what went on behind the scenes at Chicago (as well as in Washington before the convention), was the critical part played by Ed Flynn—the fact that it was Flynn, more than anyone, who had convinced Roosevelt that Wallace was a liability and urged Harry Truman on him as the safest alternative; that it was Flynn, the day he arrived in Chicago, who refused to accept Jimmy Byrnes as a fait accompli, as Kelly and Hannegan had; that it was Flynn, with perfect timing on the second ballot, who delivered the important New York vote.

  Southern opposition to Wallace because of his views on racial equality was clear, as was the refusal of northern liberals to accept the southerner Byrnes for his opposing views on the same subject. What was not so clear still was the degree to which Flynn worried over the black vote in New York, the point he had stressed at the secret White House meetings in the spring. It was vital that Truman had no opposition from organized labor, as Byrnes did. It was important that Truman was seen by the conservative side of the party—the southerners’ side—as the kind of politician they could work with, who would “go along” in the old phrase, as Wallace never could. It was also very important that Truman had no enemies, that nearly everybody liked Harry Truman, and especially in the Senate, where there would be much work to do when the war was over and the Senate once again, as after the first war, would take part in establishing the peace. But given Ed Flynn’s concern about the black vote, it was, after all, Truman’s record on civil rights—his stand in the Senate against the poll tax, his Sedalia speech in 1940, his talk to black delegates at the 1940 convention—that made him the right man, a somewhat ironic turn for the son of unreconstructed Missouri lineage who would soon be accused of having once been a member of the Ku Klux Klan.